WARM-UP EXERCISES



Interactive Learning:

Goals, Challenges, & Methods

Goals

1. Team building: help participants get to know one another and create a spirit of cooperation and interdependence.

2. On-the-spot assessment: learn about the attitudes, knowledge, and experience of participants.

3. Immediate learning involvement: create interest in the training topic.

4. Involve the “affective” domain: help people explore attitudes, emotions, values, and feelings about a topic.

Challenges

1. Level of threat: We don’t want to put people on the spot. It’s important to build a safe learning environment where interactive learning can occur.

2. Appropriateness to group norms: Consider your audience. They may not want to participate fully in group activities. Some groups may be sensitive to sharing feelings or information about their workplace, etc. It’s important to conduct a needs assessment.

3. Relevance to training content: The closer you are to the content, the easier it is to make the link between one idea and another. People who are less knowledgeable about the content may need help seeing the purpose of an exercise. It is important to make the connection between what you are asking people to do and what you hope to accomplish by the task.

4. Getting participation: Some groups may be reluctant to participate; other groups may be dominated by an individual. It is important to use a variety of techniques to encourage everyone to participate.

Methods for increasing participation:

1. Open discussion—Ask an open-ended question and open it up for group discussion.

2. Response cards—Pass out index cards and request anonymous answers.

3. Polling—Verbally poll all participants on a specific question or issue or provide a questionnaire to be filled out and tallied on the spot.

4. Small-group discussion—Share and record information.

5. Partners—Instruct people to work together on tasks or key questions.

6. “Go arounds”—Go around the group and obtain short responses to key questions.

7. Games—Use popular game formats to elicit participants’ ideas or knowledge.

8. Calling on the next speaker—Ask participants to raise their hands if they want to share their views.

9. Panels—Invite a small number of participants to present their views to the group.

10. Fishbowls—Have a small group form a discussion group in the middle of a larger circle of observers. Key ideas can be brought into focus afterward during a large group discussion.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download